[danso]

Sorry to go a bit off-topic, but how did school districts in the 80s justify buying licenses for Oregon Trail and other games of the era? The cost of OT must have been equivalent if not much more (inflation-adjusted) than even the consumer price for Minecraft. Admittedly, school funding has changed since then and it may be especially hard in today's assessment-focused ("teaching to the test", as some might say) paradigm to argue that Minecraft is a qualifying expenditure. But Apple gave away computers to get an inroad in education. Free Minecraft for schools might be a reasonable giveaway for Microsoft.

[GuiA]

They did not buy licenses.

That game (and others) was developed by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC), an organization founded by Minnesota legislature. They developed educational software and distributed it on computers across the state of Minnesota.

Later, due to the huge success of the game, they sold the game (bundled with others) across the US.

tl;dr: made possible by government funding

https://medium.com/@stevepepple/why-did-all-children-of-a-ce... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC

[II2II]

One big reason: educational games have fallen out of favour within school systems. Many teachers were simply using them as incentives, rather than using them as guided educational tools. Without the guidance, these games had minimal value for learning. Of course, the value of the educational content also varied a lot. Even the good ones depended a lot on rote memorization, which cyclically goes into and out of favour among educators.

In this case, the other issue is that Minecraft is pure entertainment software. It may have educational value, but the origin of the game makes it a hard sell. (Civilization and SimCity faced similar problems.)